No mere retail mixup can really “ruin” any holiday. Holidays aren’t about turkeys or iPods or even candles: they’re about bringing people who care about each other or who are at least related to each other together for warm memories and strained conversation. Reader L. is disappointed in Best Buy, though: their mixup means that he couldn’t give his family the great presents he had planned for Hanukkah. [More]

We thought that maybe exploding iPods were a 2008 phenomenon, but evidently not. An 11-year-old girl’s iPod exploded in England, and Apple reportedly tried to get the entire family to sign a confidentiality agreement in order to get a refund.

Reader D’s first-gen iPod Nano was chugging power from his PC’s USB port when suddenly he saw it “explode open and start shooting sparks and spewing smoke.” Pictures inside, along with Apple’s response.

While we’re subversively busy this morning giving our TSA lurkers more bullet-points for cool swag they can justify confiscating from us as dangerous weapons (we imagine a common determinant in their thought process is: “Wouldn’t I look just darling in that passenger’s swank rhinestone belt and Gucci stilettos?”) let’s add the iPod Nano to the list!

Here’s an ad explaining how the crazy hooking up an iPod nano to your Nike running shoe works. Pretty f’n cool. It seems like your nano will speak to you and tell you how far you’ve run, how far you have to go, how long you ran, etc. You can then redock your nano and track all your progress on the computer.